People spend considerable time using their electronic devices, and more particularly, their handheld electronic devices (also referred to as mobile electronic devices), such as mobile telephones, music players, PDAs (personal digital assistant) and the like. Users best like those devices that are intuitive to use and whose interactions best meet their expectations regarding how machines should operate. They interact with electronics through inputs and outputs from the devices, where the outputs generally are provided audibly and/or on a flat graphical display screen. Inputs may occur via touch screens, joysticks, mice, keypads, rollers balls and other such input mechanisms.
As electronic devices become more powerful, users interact with them more by viewing and/or interacting with graphical entities, such as maps, images, video, web pages and the like. The information represented by such entities may be enormous and very large (e.g., a detailed map of the United States can be miles wide), while the displays on electronic devices can be very small. As a result, it can be a challenge to provide graphical information in sufficient detail for a user, for example, by zooming in on one area of an entity, while still giving the user a sense of space and permitting the user to move intuitively through the space.